Weird Waves. The series that beautifully captured the imagination of the surfing community, as seen through the eyes of we’re calling one of the most charismatic surfers out there–Mr Dylan Graves.
And as you may of seen via our socials, we are with Mr Graves on location in Costa Rica for Stab High. A man who like us, has a penchant for poolside cocktails, and with last night’s poolside bar drinking descending into debauchery we thought of no better time to speak to Dylan the morning after the night before on all things weird waves. Naturally, hungover. Greeted with a bean burrito lovingly made in the house Dylan is sharing with fellow Vans stable mate Mr Mikey Feb, we then decided to hit the rooftop pool with some of Central America’s finest electrolytes for a little chinwag.
So Dylan, Weird Waves season 3 – talk us through it.
At the beginning, with Covid taking over the world we had no idea if there even would be a third season! After the initial lockdown and we were allowed to hit the beaches, the first thing that happened was episode one – the bioluminescent waves. We thought, well, even if we have a season or not, we’re going to go and film this as it’s really cool. I was genuinely interested in the red tide so we just took it upon ourselves to film and do stuff. Whether it’s weird waves or not, this is what we do. I don’t know how not to do it!
Then I guess the world found it’s footing a little with the pandemic and Vans was like “let’s do this!”. We had to do all the paperwork etc as you would expect but we’re stoked. We’ve been keeping it local, three episodes in California and one in Texas.
Wanna give us a spoiler?
Of course! Well episode one is out, and we’re hyped on that. The second one is in Texas where we go tanker surfing with the guy that coined that phrase, James – I believe it used to be called ‘ship surfing’ before that. James had a news interview and said that and coined the phrase. We thought it would be rad to link up with the godfather of tanker surfing and see it through his eyes.
The third episode is back in California, it’s called the Children of the Weird and it’s a multi faceted episode seeing three different scenes in California but you’ll have to watch the episode to scope that out! It’s rad though, I promise. Keeping it local has opened my eyes to cool stuff.
Then we hit Lake Tahoe, which is insane as it’s pretty small. I really didn’t think there would be a short board-able wave there but there fully was.
Wouldn’t be weird waves without a lake!
Oh man, we have to have a lake! Vans wouldn’t back it otherwise. We were having the conversation at Lake Tahoe, there are a ton of lakes out there. I want to hit them all!
Is there a master list of weird waves for when the world fully opens up?
When we started the entire concept we made a master list of 30 spots. It’s kind of my goal with the series to hit those spots then that might be my mission complete. Maybe that’s too ambitious, I might still be hitting them when I’m 60. All grey trying to do airs. That would be sick. It’s also always evolving, you hit one scene and find out about another one and dive into that. A vortex of novelty waves.
And you and Dave Malcolm did all the music?
Yeah, we had some help from Victor Pakpour and Abe Rounds to help us out. I guess they came in as the big guns to help elevate the whole thing as my musical ability is…. Limited?
Surely not?
Haha, well I guess I play guitar and keyboards and I make some little beats with that. So does Dave, during the lockdown we were keeping busy on that so we had a lot of stuff ready which was cool.
So it seems like this season is a little more closer to home in more ways then one?
Yep, I mean there’s no studio or anything. I make all the wave find devices out of cardboard and then we film it in my garage. That opening scene is all in there, made a little background with drapes and bought a lazy boy off craigslist. No shit. It’s super homemade but I love it.
So what’s next?
So there is a wedge next to my house in Puerto Rico where I grew up so I’m going to go back there and show where the weirdness started for me with my friends, there’s some cool stuff happening around Puerto Rico so I’m stoked to fire that up! Just need to shake off this hangover and we’re good to go!
